I suspect they meant it runs natively in that it’s an aarch64 binary. It’s still running a VM under the hood because docker is really just a nice frontend to a bunch of Linux kernel features.
M1 is just worse arm. Since most people use x86_64 instead of arm, docker had to emulate that architecture and therefore had performance issues. Now you’ve got arm specific images that don’t require that hardware emulation layer, and so work a lot better.
Since that didn’t solve the Linux kernel requirement, it’s still running a VM to provide it.
Try limiting it down to 2GB (there is an option in the Docker Desktop app). Before I discovered this option, the VM was normally eating 3-4GB of my memory.
Does docker really spin up a VM to run containers?
Yes, under windows and osx at least.
Is that still true? I use Linux but my coworker said docker runs natively now on the M1s but maybe he was making it up
I suspect they meant it runs natively in that it’s an aarch64 binary. It’s still running a VM under the hood because docker is really just a nice frontend to a bunch of Linux kernel features.
Maybe they just meant that it runs ARM binaries instead of running on Rosetta 2.
Docker requires the Linux kernel to work.
M1 is just worse arm. Since most people use x86_64 instead of arm, docker had to emulate that architecture and therefore had performance issues. Now you’ve got arm specific images that don’t require that hardware emulation layer, and so work a lot better.
Since that didn’t solve the Linux kernel requirement, it’s still running a VM to provide it.
Not making it up, but possibly confused. OCI containers are built on Linux-only technologies.
So that’s why it’s so memory hungry…
Try limiting it down to 2GB (there is an option in the Docker Desktop app). Before I discovered this option, the VM was normally eating 3-4GB of my memory.
On macos it does